CNN Worries New Facebook Speech Rules Will Result In People Calling Women ‘Property’ And Trans ‘Its’

On Tuesday, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that Meta would eliminate professional fact-checking in the coming months in an effort to “restore free expression” across Facebook, Instagram, and Meta platforms. Zuckerberg admitted that Meta’s current content moderation practices had “gone too far.” 

“We’re going to get back to our roots and focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies and restoring free expression on our platforms,” Zuckerberg said in a video posted Tuesday morning. “More specifically, we’re going to get rid of fact-checkers and replace them with Community Notes similar to X, starting in the U.S.”

Zuckerberg’s decision is an obvious win for free speech, a decision all Americans should champion. Yet that is not the case. Some news outlets are enraged by the decision, specifically CNN.

A story from the outlet today warned that danger is on the way following Zuckerberg’s announcement and an additional update to Meta’s hateful conduct policy. According to CNN’s Clare Duffy, Facebook’s  users are now permitted to “refer to women as household objects or property.”

Who exactly plans to refer to females as “objects and property,” you might wonder? Duffy doesn’t specify. Rather, she just notes that it could happen under the new policy.

But that is not her only fear. Oh, no. She also added that other Facebook users may now “refer to transgender or non-binary people” as, wait for it, “its.”

CNN promoted the article heavily on its homepage Wednesday morning. 

We can’t help but chuckle to see journalists so bent out of shape over these changes considering they expressed no such concerns over the previous iteration of Meta, which engaged in ugly authoritarian-like political censorship.

For background, Zuckerberg admitted last August that Meta censored political content on behalf of the Biden-Harris administration. In doing so, Meta acted not as a private company (which is not beholden to First Amendment laws) but instead as a state actor.

As Daily Wire co-founder Ben Shapiro, a lawyer, told OutKick in 2021, tech companies censoring ordinary Americans to help the government circumvent the First Amendment are violating the Constitution.

“We have the White House telling Facebook to take things down. Now you’re looking at Facebook as an agent of the government. That’s a First Amendment case,” Shapiro argued.

Yet CNN and Clare Duffy are more worried that someone might be called an “it” on Facebook.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg shared an epic 4th of July celebration video. Watch the incredible video. What was he doing? (Credit: Getty Images)

Tech companies should never have been in the business of policing hate speech. Who are the anonymous tech bros to decide what is and is not “hateful,” anyway?

Plus, if someone wants to treat a woman like their “property,” isn’t it best that women know that beforehand?

As we’ve long maintained, people with truly destructive thoughts will eventually convict themselves if you let them. So let them. The answer to hate speech is not less speech. The answer to hate speech is more speech. 

Let them dig their own grave.

The only types of speech that tech platforms – not publishers – should be in the business of removing are threats of violence, encouragements of violence, or posts that violate individual’s privacy, such as publishing their addresses, phone numbers, or personal information.

If the downside to Meta’s new policy is that a few people get called “its” and “objects,” so be it.